Review Summary: Hope they need a DJ somewhere in the afterlife
Back in 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, my wife and I noticed a phrase which seemed to crop up suddenly all over the place, from advertising to small talk with acquaintances - “
with everything that’s been going on”. To us, it was pretty irritating, a string of words that, seemingly by design, are so hopelessly vague as to be meaningless, even if they represent a convenient shorthand for the kind of pervasive unease and uncertainty which, then and now, seems to be ever more en vogue.
I’ve long perceived Everything Everything as the musical avatar for “
with everything that’s been going on” - obviously, they were already around well before Covid-19 became a household word, but their thematic concerns have always dwelt upon quirky post-modern dissections of contemporary life - technology, loneliness, corrosive politics - you name it, it’ll be in an Everything Everything song, cloaked in lyricism both preposterous and witty. Personally, I’ve always respected the collective’s music more than I loved it, with their zany ethos and over-the-top attempts at catchiness feeling a bit
much for me, even as I acknowledge the heaps of praise thrown at the Manchester band by plenty of music fans whose opinions I respect.
With that disclaimer aside, I’ve found myself drawn back to Everything Everything’s latest product,
Mountainhead, again and again since its release three days ago. This doesn’t mean, though, that the band have reigned in their traditional tendencies - indeed, this new album is as shamelessly maximalist as ever. Any difference in perception, then, probably comes from my side - it’s increasingly hard to ignore that this band’s style of goofy dystopianism is (unnervingly) the sound of the times. The most obvious sign might be that a clownish former president with an unnatural skin tone is simultaneously both veering closer and closer to Nazi-style rhetoric and leading in the polls in my native country, but there's plenty to disorient the observer of current events - the old rules don't seem to apply, what’s up is down, and the unthinkable today becomes the expected tomorrow. And in this climate of more and more real-world chaos that is, indeed, often “stranger than fiction”, it seems the least we can do is enjoy some groovy bops which do their best to capture the weirdness.
And lordy, there are bops. The immediately obvious catchiness of most of this album’s fourteen songs is superlative, even compared to this band’s notable previous efforts. Songs like “Wild Guess”, “Cold Reactor”, “The Mad Stone”, “Enter The Mirror”, and “Dagger’s Edge” (yes, I exercised restraint with that list) are grandiose, feature massive hooks, and are completely unabashed about letting their absurd sides shine, while the record’s shiny production only enhances the effect. If the album sprawls towards an hour in duration and does feature a few weaker moments (“TV Dog”, at the very least, probably could’ve been cut), the large majority of the runtime is immensely entertaining. Then, in its final stages,
Mountainhead takes a turn into more vibey territories, with the closing duo of “City Song” and “The Witness” displaying an urbane, Strokes-ian mood which leaves the listener more satisfied than yet another sugar rush of full-throttle pop songcraft might’ve.
Lots of artists aspire to create an album which matches the zeitgeist (easier said than done), but
Mountainhead comes a lot closer than most. With its paranoid and sinister belly coalescing with the joke-y casualness of its exterior, this is yet another successful record from one of the quintessential bands of the internet age, even if this listener didn’t quite believe in their vision until now. Everything Everything throws a lot of bizarro lyricism at the wall here, and nearly
everything (ha ha ha) sticks - after all, the world at large shares their penchant for absurdism more and more clearly everyday. A few years ago, I might’ve shrugged off the idea that future me would be head-bobbin’ along to soaring choruses like “
I love you like an atom bomb” (“Cold Reactor”) or “
we all become tomorrow’s bacon, the customer is always right” (“Dagger’s Edge”), but here we are. Looks like the 21st Century is gonna be a wild ride, folks, but let’s keep on jamming.
